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Welcome to the Inquiry with me, David Baker.
Each week, one question, four expert witnesses, and an answer.
In November this year, 30 NATO vessels carrying 4,000 military personnel embarked on a 10 day drill in the Baltic Sea in northeastern Europe.
Their mission, to find ways to protect the elaborate network of undersea communications cables and gas pipelines that link the countries.
In the two days before the fleet set off, two of those cables, one between Sweden and Lithuania, the other between Finland and Germany, had been severed by a Chinese ship dragging its anchor on the seabed.
And that was just the latest in a series of attacks on the Baltic's undersea infrastructure that have taken place since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The countries in the region are worried as events like these bring the war in Ukraine closer to Europe's borders.
So in this episode of the inquiry, we're asking, can NATO protect the Baltic Sea?
Part 1 the cable incident the first signs of that most recent attack came on the morning of Sunday November 17th.
The operators of a cable in the Baltic Sea connecting Sweden and Lithuania discovered that the cable had been damaged.
Then, less than 24 hours later, the operators of another cable discovered that it too had been damaged.
And that cable is the only cable connecting Finland with Germany.
Our first witness is Elizabeth Braugh, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Scowcroft Centre for Strategy and Security, a think tank based in Washington D.C.
in the U.S.
and the author of an upcoming book called the Undersea War.
What appears to have happened is that whoever damaged these two cables dragged its anchor across the cables.